Email Safety

www.jstechs.com > Email Safety

Most of this section will be dealing with preventing viruses and other malware from entering your computer through email.

The first topic, however, provides some basic information about preventing unwanted email in the first place; because almost all potentially harmful emails come from senders you don’t know who are sending these emails either to try to infect your computer or for monetary gain. Either way, you don't want them.

SPAM Prevention

The most effective method of eliminating unwanted email is also the simplest - Do not put your email address in plain text anywhere on the web.

While this may seem impossible as you must provide others with a way to contact you, it’s really quite simple.

If you need to provide an email address on your website you can use the same type of system as the Contact Us button on the right of this page. Simply put this script where the Contact Us button should go on your site. Just edit the bolded text to reflect your address. The "@" will be added automatically.


The above will create the following link:


If you would rather display your email address on the page you can use:


Which will create:

Either method will protect your email address from being harvested by "spambots" going from page to page gathering email addresses.


If you use PayPal on your website for online payments you must have your email address in the form to submit your information to PayPal. Email addresses anywhere in the HTML including here can be harvested for spamming.

To protect your email address you can use the following correction to fix this problem. Just edit the bolded text and insert on your site where indicated:

The changes are:

• The addition of name="different name for each payment button".
• The removal of your email address from <input type="hidden" name="business" value="email@address.com">
• And the addition of the JavaScript between the line above and the next line.

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If you need to post your email address on forums or newsgroups use the following or similar:
you [AT] domain.com

Many sites require you to register with a valid email address before use. Depending on the site even this can get you on some SPAM mailing lists.

An alternative to endangering your main email account is to use a free email service such as Gmail from Google. With over 2GB of storage space per account there is no problem of ever running out of space.
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Attachments

Do not open any emails or attachments of which you do not know the sender.

If you receive an attachment that you were not expecting; even from someone you know, be suspicious. Many viruses spread by gathering email address from the victims computer.

If in doubt, contact the sender to make sure they meant to send the attachment.

Even if the attachment appears to be harmless, don't assume. Even data files belonging to applications that support programming languages, like VB for applications, could include potentially harmful macros.

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Antivirus

Most importantly use a quality antivirus program, like Avast, which will scan all incoming data. So that it is very unlikely to get infected with any kind of malware from email.

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Office Updates

Another important step is to keep your email program up-to-date.

If you use Microsoft Outlook you need to occasionally check Office Updates to see if there are any available updates to your version of Outlook.

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